Rating: 
Summary: Good story, but overly long.
Review: This book would've rated higher if it hadn't been so overly verbose and repetitive. I don't agree with other reviewers of this book that the cliff-hanger ending was frustrating; I like to be left wanting more. But this story could have been about half its current length and still told exactly the same thing, but would've been more exciting and much tighter. I'm hoping the second and third volumes will either be a bit faster paced, or at least have less repetition.
Rating: 
Summary: Space Opera in the grand tradition
Review: This is as good as science fiction gets, in my experience at least. BUT bear in mind that The Depths of Time is the first volume of a trilogy. The entire arc of the story encompasses *all three volumes*, a total of something like 1,300 pages. Yes, the first volume leaves large unresolved plot elements. It had to! I had all three books at hand when I started reading this first one in the series. Finished this one, read the second one, and now am half way through the third. Good all the way, and I hope well resolved in the next couple of hundred pages.The trilogy has several lines of science (ecology, space travel, wormhole time travel, artificial intelligence, and more) and social science. Characters develop and are revealed over the course of the series. Well crafted, very entertaining, and a good balance of detail (for example on spacecraft landing procedures) and of prudent omission of details where the "science" simply has to be taken as a given.
Rating:
Summary: Space Opera in the grand tradition
Review: This is as good as science fiction gets, in my experience at least. BUT bear in mind that The Depths of Time is the first volume of a trilogy. The entire arc of the story encompasses *all three volumes*, a total of something like 1,300 pages. Yes, the first volume leaves large unresolved plot elements. It had to! I had all three books at hand when I started reading this first one in the series. Finished this one, read the second one, and now am half way through the third. Good all the way, and I hope well resolved in the next couple of hundred pages. The trilogy has several lines of science (ecology, space travel, wormhole time travel, artificial intelligence, and more) and social science. Characters develop and are revealed over the course of the series. Well crafted, very entertaining, and a good balance of detail (for example on spacecraft landing procedures) and of prudent omission of details where the "science" simply has to be taken as a given.
Rating:
Summary: A Dark Future
Review: This novel is exactly the opposite of the Star Trek/Star Wars vision of the future. The feel of the book is much more along the lines of Alien/Outland, a very gritty future where there is no faster-than-light warp drive, and travel between the stars is a slow, tedious and sometimes dangerous business. What makes the trip possible is the use of wormholes to manage the time dilation effects. These wormholes are guarded by the Chronologic Patrol, one ship at each end, their job to prevent at all costs any occurence of time paradoxes. The novel opens with an attack on one of the wormholes, an unheard of event, and a very gripping portrayal of how one ship, the Upholder, and it's captain, Anton Koffield, respond to that attack. This book is a fascinating portrait of a man who has great integrity, and knows how to handle duty and responsibility. It starts with him at a high point in his career, and then follows him as he becomes a political hot potato, promoted to Admiral and assigned a desk job. Although he made the hard decision and did his job by the book, the public sees him as a monster. He is approached to write a history of terraforming, and discovers an approaching cataclysm. If you have read any of Daniel Quinn's books (Ishmael, The Story of B) this approaching cataclysm will be very familiar. I enjoyed the exploration of Anton Koffield. The author does a great job of getting into characters heads and showing us what is motivating them. It's interesting to me to witness a man who falls from grace, loses everything, and is flattered into doing work that may or may not be important, then discovering a hidden secret that has dire implications for all humanity. Seeing Koffield's opposite motivated by ego and grandiosity made a perfect counterpoint. I also enjoyed the exploration of the idea that terraforming may not be a viable concept. As I said before, I'm a fan of Daniel Quinn's, and this dovetails nicely into his ideas that our civilization is in trouble because of our need to control and our addiction to power. And what is terraforming but the ultimate expression of the need to control? I agree with the other reviewers that it would help to know that this book is part of a series. There is a hint of that in the dedication, but luckily for me I read the reviews here before I reached the end of the book. This novel is a parable, with direct implications for the time we are living in right now. The characters actions, the way crisis is portrayed, the way motivation is revealed, and an untypical vision of the future made this novel a very enjoyable read for me. I'm looking forward to the next two volumes.
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment
Review: Unfortunately, this book did not live up to its fascinating premise (time travel through wormholes) and the "teaser" synopsis on the back cover. It begins well, and the first 90 pages are excellent hard sci-fi. The book quickly degenerates into a poorly disguised pulpit for radical "environmentalism", however, with the hero discovering a model to unfailingly predict catastrophic environmental degradation. The essence of this story is that climate models are always right, and the empiricists are always wrong. The novel contains profound elements of eco-conservatism and a lot of poor science. Among other things, apparently the author didn't know that algae was a plant, and produced oxygen. In sum, I strongly recommend avoiding this book.
Rating:
Summary: Starts with a bang, then comes the whimper
Review: What a terrific start to a book -- 150 pages of intriguing action and just-as-intriguing characters. Then the wheels come off. What happened to Roger Allen to make him spend 50 pages or so on a single docking maneuvre and a ride in an elevator? After that, I felt so let down it was hard to read further. Still, I persisted and was let down even more by the lack of resolution. I'll still probably read the next in the series when it comes out because this guy clearly knows how to write, but I hope he has a new, merciless editor who takes a very sharp knife to the excess.
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